Date night

(OK, so this is a picture from our camping trip - hence the stacks of sleeping bags and Rubbermaid bins full of food behind us...)

This week, the kids are having another sleepover with Gramma and Grampa, and as usual Chad and I are giddy at the prospect of some alone time. Sorry kiddos, we miss you lots, but let's face it - ten years from now you will be largely removed from our lives, and this man and I will still have to wake up in the morning to face each other and hopefully still have something to talk about. We'd better keep things humming along in the meantime. We decided that we were going to go for a nice long bike ride (have I mentioned that we have a ride coming up next month that's 127 km long, and the farthest I had gone this summer was not even 40 km? Yikes) and get some dinner on the way.

The plan was to ride out to Erieau, which has become my favourite destination this summer, and have dinner at the Bayside Brewpub before returning home. We figured it would be about 35 km each way and shouldn't take much more than an hour in either direction.

Unfortunately, I got stuck at work late, and then we loitered a little at home before we set out. And once we set out, we realized that the wind was blowing strongly out of south. And our course was pretty much due south. The first hour, we made gruelingly slow progress. We finally got to Erie Beach and from there the wind subsided or was sheltered a little; but it still took us much longer to get to Bayside than we expected.

Then dinner took longer than you'd have thought; we had to get the bikes situated, get seated, and every trip we made back and forth to the table or the bathroom or wherever was painfully slow, because we were skidding about on slippery hard floors in our cleats. Then our pizzas were held up because of a backlog in the oven. You get the idea.

To make a long story short, it was 8:30 when we headed for home, despite having inhaled that pizza faster than I've ever eaten anything in my life. I have a paranoia about cycling in the dark, but at this point we were just starting the ride home when it was darker than I would normally consider even finishing a ride. Oh well - nothing to do but go for it. We both had our blinky lights on us, thank goodness, and we shaved a couple of kms off the return trip by choosing a busier road. This actually turned out to be a wise decision, because by that hour it was not terribly busy, and yet the approaching headlights really helped to illuminate potholes and other obstacles on the route. Normally the drivers in our neck of the woods are pretty rude to cyclists, but props to everyone on Charing Cross Road last night who gave us a super wide berth and made me feel as safe as possible for someone cycling on a country road in the pitch dark.

We did make it home in one piece, rolling into our driveway a little after 9:30. Despite my worries, the ride home turned out to be quite lovely. The wind we'd hoped would be at our back had pretty much died away, but at least it wasn't blowing in our faces. The crickets were chirping and it was peaceful. And it was a good sense of accomplishment to pedal almost 70 km total, though my back was killing me by the end - something I need to remedy before we tackle the long ride in September.